Rod Humphries
Patrick Humphrys,[2] (the spelling would later be changed by government recorders) was sentenced to seven years penal servitude in Australia for stealing 200 weight of sheet lead in Dublin, Ireland.
Humphries’ maternal grandfather, Norman Farquhar, 52, who enlisted as a deputy senior air raid warden in Sydney, was buried alive on 12 October 1942 when a military trench he was digging in preparation for a possible Japanese invasion caved in during heavy rain.
His father Jack Humphries fought in the jungles of New Guinea, just 100 miles north of Australia, contracting malaria that recurred for years after the war.
Three generations of the extended Humphries/Farquhar family hunkered down in an overcrowded, narrow, two-story, two-bedroom tenement with neither indoor toilet facilities nor refrigeration attached to a general store on the corner of Small and Fletcher Streets, Woollahra, East Sydney.
During the difficult wartime and post-war conditions, the Humphries family struggled to make ends meet and after the war supplemented its income by operating an illegal bookmaking business, providing horse race gambling for local communities in east Sydney.
Beginning at 12, Humphries made a few shillings attending to clay courts at several facilities and helping the professional coaches by working on basic instruction with very young beginners.
He quickly became a fully-fledged journalist at AUP, covering national and local politics, law courts, police rounds, the stock exchange, the trade union movement, features and sports for newspapers and radio stations.
[19] Based on his nomination as International Tennis Writer of the Year, in 1975 WCT invited Humphries to witness its championship events in Mexico City and Dallas, which led to his permanent move to the United States.
The English tennis enthusiast, fashion designer, and spy Cuthbert Collingwood "Ted" Tinling commissioned Humphries to write his memoir, Love and Faults, during a visit to Sydney in 1976.
During Humphries' tenure, the WCT tour had 22 events a year in 12 countries, featuring all the world's leading players including McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Björn Borg and Ivan Lendl.
Humphries also conceived and organised an annual WCT Reunion Stars event for Hall-of-Famers, the first being in 1980 for Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe and Roy Emerson.
[24][25][26] WCT, which conducted the first "Million Dollar Tour," was the first to introduce coloured clothing[27] and the tiebreaker, and was the first entity anywhere in the world of professional or amateur sports to produce in-house television coverage of its events.
[29] Humphries became media director for the Lipton International Players Championship (now the Miami Open (tennis)) in Delray Beach and Key Biscayne, Florida, from 1986 to 1988.
In America, Humphries continued to cover major events such as a Muhammad Ali world title fight,[30][31] Wimbledon,[32] and the US Open tennis championships.
[46] On 24 April 1976, Humphries married Lynne Blumentritt, an American sports and television writer he met on his WCT invitation tour to Dallas in 1975.
They are both long-time cancer survivors and live in Richmond, a historical small town on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, and at Stone Canyon in the Tortolita Mountains outside of Tucson, Arizona.
